How this passed through Apple's Mountain Lion testing is beyond me. "If one edits a document, then chooses Save As, then BOTH the edited original document and the copy are saved, thus not only saving a new copy, but silently saving the original with the same changes, thus overwriting the original." Just goes to show: do not mess with my ability to save my stuff. There is no one-size-fits-all for this kind of delicate stuff.

*le sigh*... all files are now versioned in OS X. If you autosave a bunch of changes, the versions of the previous document is saved. "Save as" is saving the current document under a different name. I've never used "Save as" under any OS to duplicate the functionality that we seem to be having issues with here? Why? Because I religiously hit save (ctrl+s or whatever) every couple of minutes. The current document on disk is the document I'm duplicating. Your usage may vary, obviously.

The issue here is the workflow. It's that people are lazy and rely on apps not crashing and losing your work. Having lived through Acorn, Amiga, Classic Mac OS and Windows 3.1, I don't think anyone should make that assumption. Nothing like watching the OS get a GPF and your work sailing in to the ether.

The point of Lion's auto-save feature is to abstract the intricacies of the memory hierarchy away from the user. You cannot edit a vulnerable in-RAM copy of a file for hours anymore, instead you edit a periodically updated on-disk copy that loses only a few minutes worth of work in the event of a hardware failure. That's actually a very good thing, as it voids the need for most people's hysteric manual saving disorder, replacing it with a superior versioning mechanism !

Really, I'd change a few details myself, but it seems to me that Apple got the big picture right for this feature.

hmm, voids the need for, "hysteric manual saving disorder, replacing it with an inferior hysteric manual copy disorder" from what I can gleam, though saving rather than copying, before editing, I'd have thought more prone to tears-at-bedtime than power failure.

Bit puzzled about what's actually going on here...though losing an original document to save the possible loss of an edited version is counter-intuitive to how people actually think/work editing stuff. Can imagine a 'collaborative' document could end-up having little or no relation(unintended)to the original.

To me the best feature is that it's opt-in on the part of apps and that at least Photoshop and some other apps I use a lot don't opt-in. [Yet?] I really find it to be one of the most annoying things I've ever dealt with for content creation - having to now manually remember to revert all changes out of a file before closing the app or window if I actually want to discard them, or having to make duplicates ahead of time just to do temporary operations - otherwise having what are in many cases just tests or throwaway changes on graphics and 3d models overwriting the originals.

Most apps are stable enough to not worry about them suddenly quitting, and most already had a timed autosave that you could use to open the file with the changes that were in progress while leaving the original file alone. Much nicer for how I work.

Oh, and as a bonus - DON'T think that autosave will protect you if the app crashes, at least not any more than having timed backup/temp files written out. If the app hasn't autosaved your most recent changes yet, they're lost in case of a crash! Surprise!

... So, how are we to create shared templates that won't get overwritten the first time someone tries to create a new document from a template?

By "Locking" the file. I think this was a feature since Lion. It would auto-lock the file after not being edited for a while, and it would offer you to duplicate the file. I think you can lock / unlock the file at will, but I haven't tried.

But I agree, this is breaking existing workflows. May be good, may be bad.